Ballasts are commonly used to supply power to a wide variety of electrically powered components. Often ballasts are connected directly to the component (or load), for example, by “permanent” connections, such as wires or soldered leads on a circuit board, or by “removable” connections, such as plugs or other connectors. Direct electrical connections present a number of problems. First, direct electrical connections make it difficult to install and remove the load from the ballast. With permanent connections, the electrical leads must be soldered or otherwise secured directly between the ballast and the load. If the ballast or the load is damaged, replacement is complicated by the permanent connections. Removable connections make separation of the ballast and the load easier, but still require some manual manipulation. Removable connectors are also subject to corrosion and may be inadvertently or unintentionally disconnected, for example, by vibrations. Second, in many environments, direct electrical connections must be insulated from the environment to prevent damage to the circuit. For example, in wet environments, exposed electrical connections are subject to a short circuit. Third, direct electrical connections provide a direct and essentially unimpeded path for electricity to flow between the ballast and the load. As a result, power surges and other potentially damaging abnormalities in one element can be directly transfer to the other, thereby permitting problems in one component to damage or even destroy the other.
To address these and other significant problems, there is an increasing trend to replace conventional direct electrical connections with inductive connections. Inductively coupled systems provide a number of significant advantages over direct connections. First, inductive couplings do not include permanent or removable physical connectors. Instead, the secondary coil of the load (or secondary circuit) simply needs to be placed in the close proximity to the primary coil of the ballast. This greatly simplifies installation and removal of the load. Second, the inductive coupling provide a significant level of isolation between the ballast and the load. This isolation can protect one component from power surges and other potentially damaging abnormalities in the other component.
Unfortunately, conventional inductively coupled ballasts suffer from a number of problems associated primarily with efficiency. To provide maximum efficiency, it is desirable for the circuit to operate at resonance. Conventional ballasts are designed to operate at resonance by carefully selecting the components of the ballast in view of the precise characteristics of the load. Any variation in the load can move the circuit dramatically out of resonance. Accordingly, conventional ballasts require very precise selection of the components of the ballast circuit and secondary circuit. In some applications, the impedance of the secondary circuit will vary over time, thereby changing the resonant frequency of the circuit. For example, in many conventional lighting applications, the impedance of the lamp will vary as the lamp is heated and will also vary over the life of the lamp. As a result of these changes, the efficiency of conventional, fixed-frequency ballasts will vary over time.
Conventional ballast control circuits employ bipolar transistors and saturating transformers to provide power. The ballast control circuits oscillate at frequencies related to the magnetic properties of the materials and winding arrangements of these transformers. Circuits with saturating transformer oscillators produce an output in the category of a square wave, require the transistors of the half bridge to hard-switch under load and require a separate inductor to limit the current through the load. Conventional circuits chop the available power supply voltage, developing voltage spikes at the corners of the square wave as a consequence of the current limiting inductor. Inductive couplings rely on electromagnetic induction to transfer power from a primary coil to a secondary coil. The amount of current induced in the secondary coil is a function of the changes in the magnetic field generated by the primary coil. Accordingly, the amount of current transferred through an inductive coupling is dependent, in part, on the waveform of the current driving the primary. A square waveform has relatively small regions of change and therefore provides relatively inefficient transfer of power.
These and other deficiencies in prior ballasts are addressed by the present invention.